Quote Originally Posted by Talakeal View Post

The problem is that when people come back at me I switch from cynical twitter mode to curious / obsessive forum mode and try and have a conversation where we actually understand one another's views, which twitter is not technically or socially prepared for, and most conversation end up with the other person dismissing me as a right wing troll and/or spending the majority of their post incorrectly telling me what I said or what I believe.
From my experience, Twitter is just generally very bad for discussing anything more complicated than 'what I ate for lunch today' so probably shouldn't have much weight placed on it.

Back on topic, I also was very gender abolitionist back in university (so, late teens to early 20s), a position that I'm a bit more nuanced about nowawadys, partly due to coming to terms with my own gender (and how, with hindsight, that was something that pushed me gender abolitionism in the first place). So I may not be entirely unaware about where you're coming from on some of this.

I don't have a clue what gender identity is.
Good news and bad news: you're not alone in that. In fact, I don't think anyone has a concise clear model for gender identity.
But then, why would they?
Because it's not as if there's a rich, long history of documented research into gender identity. Like most things that are adjacent to 'trans-issues', historically it's either been considered irrelevant or actively censored and surpressed as a topic of research. Academically, it's effectively a new field - and a quite a complex one. There simply isn't a concise model for gender identity, because we're still in the process of trying to find one that works (and, notably, 'social roles' doesn't - more on this later) or indeed if there even is going to be an intuitive model that accounts for it.
The definition is changing is but so is our understanding of it, based on people's experiences and behaviours in how they relate to that. This is just in academia; most people talking about gender online are not coming from an academic background, haven't really had that much experience or training in philosophical inquiry, so are very unlikely to be able to come up with a sound definition on demand.

Yeah, it would be very nice to have a clear, concrete definition you could at least point people at. But our collective knowledge base isn't there yet, assuming there even will be one.

I could get that... except that they also insist that you divorce it from biological sex OR social role.
Ah, this might be my fault actually.

...

Okay, not specifically mine, but people like me: agender and 'third-gender' non-binary people in societies and cultures that do not have those gender roles. While non-binary identity does tend to get overlooked a lot in discussions about gender, the fact remains that it presents a difficult problem with the idea of 'gender as social roles', because it's rather tricky to have something that exists be the product of a social role that doesn't.

Now, if you want to have a descriptive definition of gender then you need to account for this, which means that you do in fact have to divorce it from social roles. The fact that non-binary identity also isn't particularly tied to 'biological sex' and that non-binary people do still experience dysphoria, including people on the agender and 'third-gender' end of the spectrum, places a similar requirement whant it comes to that too. So if you're taking a scientific approach then, logically, you can only conclude that, whatever gender is, it likely involves something else that isn't either of those.



The point I'm sort of getting at here is that the lack of concrete definition of gender identity is not incompatable with it being descriptive, or based on observation. Behaviour and psychology might not the most clearly defined observable things, but they are still observable phenomena.